Posted 1 year ago on Oct. 1, 2013, 11:37 p.m. EST by WSmith
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Do you want to get progressives elected in 2014?

By Lacey Connelly | Posted on August 26, 2013

Do you want to get progressives elected in 2014?

I do! Which is why earlier this year, I applied to be a member of the PCCC’s inaugural P100 class. I was lucky enough to be accepted and my progressive finance training began.

My name is Lacey Connelly and I’m a new fellow here at the PCCC. We’re working to train 100s of up-and-coming activists to work on progressive campaigns this cycle and I couldn’t be more happy to pay my experience forward!

I attended the first P100 training in Chevy Chase, MD back in March. I learned so much about prepping and staffing call time, planning fundraising events, and putting together a fundraising media plan that I was confident enough to go to Kentucky and kick-start a fundraising operation for a new candidate for Congress. Now I’m working for the PCCC to recruit the next class of progressive campaign workers!

Our next training will be in Madison, WI on September 28th-29th and will focus on developing finance staff to work on competitive races in 2014.

You really should click here and apply!

We’ll review all applications and the most qualified applicants will be contacted for a follow up interview. The 25 finalists will be notified three weeks prior to the training. Apply as soon as possible — the final deadline is September 2nd. After the training, the PCCC will work to place you on a progressive campaign so you can put your skills to use getting good people elected!

If you can’t make the training in WI but want to hear more about future trainings, go ahead and apply; just click “Interested in Future Trainings.”

Tea Party Republicans have driven the government to a shutdown for the first time in 17 years. At stake, thanks to their showmanship, is our ongoing economic recovery. That’s why we’ll be holding Tea Party Republicans accountable for this nonsense.

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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that he was disappointed after meeting with President Obama at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, telling reporters, “The President is stubbornly refusing to end the crisis I created.”

“Government is about teamwork,” Mr. Boehner continued. “I’ve done my part by putting together an entirely optional crisis that has shut down the government and will throw thousands out of work. Now it’s up to the President to do his part by ending it.”

Mr. Boehner said that he was “flabbergasted” that the President was looking to him to bring the current government shutdown to an end: “So after doing all of the hard work to push the country to the brink, I’m supposed to pull it back, too? How about you pitching in a little, Mr. President?”

The House Speaker said that he hoped he did not have to manufacture another entirely avoidable crisis over the debt ceiling in order to stir the President to action. “Quite frankly, orchestrating these unnecessary stalemates takes a lot of energy and I could really use a rest,” he said.

But Mr. Boehner seemed pessimistic that the President “got the message.”

“Because of my actions, thousands of federal workers have already been furloughed,” he said. “How many more people do I have to throw out on the street before the President wakes up?”

Director Jacob Kornbluth describes his documentary Inequality For All as “An Inconvenient Truth for the economy.” The film’s Al Gore figure is economist and UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich who explains how the U.S. middle class shriveled, crippling economic growth. According to the film, the fact that only 400 people own half of America’s assets could be a death sentence to the economy — and even democracy.
Director Jacob Kornbluth (left) and Robert Reich.

Kornbluth himself is well acquainted with poverty. Because his father died with he was young, “My mom raised a family of four on a substitute teacher’s salary,” he told MoveOn. “I think it was $9,000 to $15,000 a year. So I was always kind of aware of who gets what in society.”

His career as an indie filmmaker wasn’t political at all. “I always wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t want to tell stories that told people what to think,” he said. All of that changed when he felt like not only was the economy failing Americans, but the dialogue around it was too. “I decided I had to drop everything. As a filmmaker, I thought, ‘I should pick up a camera and do something.’ So for the first time in my life, I decided to get active.”

Getting active meant interviewing Reich ifor a series of web videos about the economy that caught the eye of MoveOn, The Nation, and hundreds of thousands of viewers. Kornbluth then got the urge to make something even bigger: a movie explaining the economic situation in a more straightforward, more engaging way than the nightly news. “So I pitched the idea to [Reich],” Kornbluth says. “I think he agreed because he didn’t know what he was getting into.” Kornbluth, Reich, and company shot 550 hours of footage over the course of a year, and then spent another nine months editing.

inequality-for-all

The surprising result is a film about economics that’s fun, funny, and even a tearjerker at times. “I hope that people who don’t normally watch films about economics watch this movie, because I think they’ll like it,” Kornbluth says. “Inequality affects us all: rich, poor, middle class, everyone. Liberals, conservatives…Conservatives like the movie. A lot of them have been persuaded by the arguments. It doesn’t play like an overly partisan film.”

“The idea is,” he continues, “even the rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than they would with a larger share of an economy that’s been as stagnant as America’s has been for the past five years. The position of the film is not to demonize the rich or to, frankly, demonize conservatives either. It’s simply to say, this is a problem that affects us all.”

Reich on Democracy Now!

So what if you’re convinced inequality’s a problem but feel overwhelmed? Kornbluth says the Inequality For All website breaks inequality down into six areas so you can pick where to take action: tax reform, campaign finance reform, Wall Street reform, education, the need for unions, and the fight for a decent living wage. “Consider me two or three years ago,” he advises. “I was frustrated, but everybody can do something. If I can do something, everybody can.”

Thanks, Jacob! Watch the trailer, find a showing in your city, and take action.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic [ YES, NOT SHOWING UP, POUTING, CASTS A VOTE! ]. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.

Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fucking fill.